Experiences! > Algorithms

No one knows your child’s talents, interests, and needs better than you. Try to incorporate these into your lives, on special occasions, regularly, or day to day. Stimulate their minds and let them go deep into what interests them. It will build strong brain pathways in contrast to the screen’s quick cuts that train the brain to expect constant stimulation with no time to think.

Hands-on, real-world experiences like visiting museums, parks, libraries, or learning skills don’t just "ll time, they build brains and shape hearts. When kids explore history, art, nature, or how things are made, they’re not just learning facts, they're learning to ask questions, see connections, appreciate others, and contribute to the world around them.

Music, movies, or martial arts on YouTube, these experiences grow confidence, empathy, and agency… the roots of active, thoughtful citizenship. Experience American culture through little league to professional sports games, baking apple pies, connecting in person in 3D spaces outside where you live or work, singing together.

Incorporate the world while you’re at it and learn about cultural holidays, try new foods, read global stories, explore maps and globes, listen to world music, visit cultural museums or festivals, and talk with people in your own community. Learn together about anything and everything. Look it up and talk about it! Best use of that screen.

Prioritize Family Time

Sharing meals decreases stress, so try to have your meals all together and encourage thoughtful and hopeful discussion. Have family meetings and discuss your wellbeing and what needs to get done. Dedicate a little down time together sometimes, where your kids know you’re right where you want to be.

Take Care of The Home Team

Understand that food and nutrition hold the key to how your body grows, builds, and functions. Drink water, eat the rainbow, read the labels. Involve your kids in cooking and make it fun with music or pretending to be restaurant staff.

Get up and move! Dance with your kids, walk, jump rope, stretch, kickbox, yoga, sit-ups and pushups, gym time, YouTube videos, stairs… get those heart rates up! Good habits and discipline up! Mood, energy, and cognitive function up! Life expectancy up!

Keep your soul lifted through prayer, meditation, and rest. Try to bring peace into yourself. Be the peace around you and reject the chaos. Get enough sleep to reset and replenish your body and your mind. Make time regularly for an activity you enjoy. Spend time outdoors around trees and in nature whenever you can. Stay in community—where you’re valued and comfortable.

Hope and Faith: Daily Vitamins for Democracy

Hope is the belief the future will be better than today, and you play a role in making our future possible. Faith is similar to hope, but faith is in the present, not the future. Faith in God, the divine energy with us always, helps us to be thankful. It makes us smile and shows God’s countenance to those who need to feel it, too.

Teach your kids to pray at bedtime, when washing their hands, anytime. Our family prays together before meals. Each night someone volunteers. It can be as simple as “Thank you, God”, or a rhyme (Thank you for the day you made, thank you for the food on my plate), or prayer for specific people or problems, but the theme is gratitude to God for food, family, and life. That gratitude helps us have faith in other things we can’t see. We see that faith in God and faith in justice are cousins. That helping others is holy. That protecting the vulnerable is American.